Techno-Prosthetic Romantic FuturismThe Net, the Gin, the TrapRomanticism on the Net: a solicism? an anachronism? We can't digitize history and download the past. Yet. [1] But we can acquiesce in the coming monstrosity of digital criticism. The apparatus of scholarship will warp and blister in the virtual wind. Theses, citations, and bibliographies will dwindle like vestigial organs. Writing will improve as reading ceases to be obligatory. Skim and scan instead of read and think. [2] Romanticism will break the net of scholarship. Notes1. In the future teaching will take place in holographic theaters that simulate, to the tiniest detail, the subject under investigation. Imagine an afternoon in Blake's hovel--the Den of the Interpreter! 2. Is this the sensibility of distraction that Walter Benjamin anticipates in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations (New York: Shocken, 1969), 219-53? Navigation |